China’s Generation Z is broke, and they have the receipts to prove it.
Hundreds of 26-year-olds have shared screenshots of their bank accounts on social media.
Some have saved less than a dollar, others have surpassed the $1000 mark. But they all have one thing in common: they are angry.
The Chinese dream of collective prosperity — and a life of precocious children, luxurious cars, and cozy homes — is dead. And Gen Z has paid the price.
To date, more than 300 million Chinese have read a forum post titled “My Real Savings at 26” on the Twitter-like platform Weibo. Business Insider saw hundreds of posts where people posted screenshots of their bank statements and claimed they were 26 and totally broke.
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As of press time, more than 12,000 people had posted on the viral Weibo forum, which is similar to a subreddit.
A Weibo user in southwest Sichuan province confessed to having $0.14 (ten cents) in the account.
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Another Weibo user in east China’s Anhui province said he had $21.29 in his bank account — and that was the paycheck he’d just received for a day’s work.
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“My savings at 26. What a joke,” wrote a Guangdong Weibo user and posted on Weibo a record $1,890 in savings.
“I’m 26 this year too. Savings? What savings?” wrote a Weibo user from Jiangsu, showing a screenshot of $67 savings in his bank account: “Don’t everyone live paycheck to paycheck and spend their entire salary?”
While it’s for the Generation Z in the western world Maybe being broke isn’t a big deal, for the Chinese it’s serious business. The pinnacle of success in China can be summed up in one word: 孨. The 2012 coined term “zhuan” refers to the characteristics of a Chinese man’s personal success: house (房子), car (车子), and wife (妻子).
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To put things in perspective, the average Chinese Gen Z earns around $596 a month. They are also confronted with a brutal labor market – in April, every fifth Chinese youth between the ages of 16 and 24 was unemployed. And at the same time they give more than Millennials and Generation X into luxury goods and cosmetics.
And now that Chinese Generation Z is feeling the pain, get it a Weibo comment – who has been liked more than 700 times at the time of writing – perhaps best sums up the situation together.
“The students who just graduated are now feeling how badly Chinese society and workplace are kicking their butts,” wrote Yidali Neizhinu, a Weibo user from Chongqing.
“Before the pandemic, people used to joke and say, ‘A 30-year-old without a million yuan cannot be considered a human being’ and ‘a man in a big city who does not own a house does not deserve a woman,'” they added . “Now that you’ve faced reality and realized that money is bloody hard to make, how does it feel to eat your words?”
People shared their savings on Weibo in Chinese yuan; the conversion into euros is as of May 20th. Business Insider was unable to verify each bank’s screenshots.
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